Blog - Page 76
A collection of 2,474 blog posts
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle I’ve been obsessed with thinking about, adjusting and building upon my habits for a long time now, and working on good habits is probably one of the things that’s helped me the most to make progress with my startup. In addition, it seems like habits are now becoming popular again. This is a great thing, and books like The Power of Habit are helping lots of people. Perhaps one of the things that is rarely
Since the beginning of Buffer, we’ve always shared all of our learnings and failures. Over time this developed into a more defined goal and principle as part of the values of the company. Since we defined our value of transparency within the culture, we have found many things within the company that we weren’t being completely open about, and we put them out there for the world to see. We’ve generally found that we are sharing a lot of things that are somewhat taboo or at least unusual to be sh
Content marketing is a topic we’re quite eager to learn about here on the Buffer blog, and it seems to be one our community is excited about as well. We invited the team at Atomic Reach to share their insight in our weekly Twitter chat. The Atomic Reach team shared some amazingly useful tips on how to craft the most engaging content for your social efforts—plus dozens of their favorite content marketing blogs to bookmark! Click here to see the full Storify recap. Read below Atomic Reach’s tip
To help with the inevitable noise surrounding a new post on social media, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ allow you to pin a post to the top of your page or profile, giving new life to old content and providing a quick win to get your most important updates even more love. Pinning seems like a very useful feature to have—and a feature ripe for experimentation. What are the best practices for pinning a post to the top of a Facebook page or a tweet to the top of a Twitter profile? How much extra e
Having all the best blogging tools and resources, having a plan to share your amazing content on social media, having everything in place to put your marketing strategy into action still requires one thing: You must create the content to be shared, loved, and engaged with. The blank page must be conquered. Coming up with an endless supply of blogging and writing ideas would be great, right? Fortunately there is a solid list of useful strategies, techniques, and questions that can always keep a
In the year and a half that I’ve focused on hiring at Buffer, I’ve received more than 2,000 applications for engineering roles. Of those applicants, 70 have gone on to interviews, and we’ve grown from a team of 2 to 10 engineers. Learning how to hire great people is one of the toughest challenges I’ve ever faced. I’ve iterated on our process for hiring engineers and I’m glad to have the opportunity to share my lessons. Here’s my first post on our hiring process and why we no longer have the tra
How do you define workplace culture? And how do you keep your company culture growing in the right direction? Buffer’s very own Chief Technology Officer, Sunil, and Chief Happiness Officer, Carolyn, stopped by #Bufferchat recently to discuss these very big questions focusing on workplace culture. Here are some of the highlights. Catch the full Storify recap here. How do you define “workplace culture?” From Sunil: * “Tough one, it means different things. For me, it’s the *how* to go about
We had fun getting back to our customers faster in October due to a renewed focus on our goals. As we were all back in our respective timezones, this was a bit easier than September. October is usually the last “normal” month before the holidays kick off, so it felt great to focus fully on continuing to improve the customer experience during this time. We also questioned some of our processes and put an experiment into place to learn a bit about how all of our support channels interact. Let’s
When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog and the content you personally create. So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses. Writing tips are a good place to start. And to supplement the words you use to
When I first joined Buffer team, many hours a day were spent solo in either Australia or Sweden. This led to an obsession of scrolling through HipChat conversations to catch up on all the things happening in other timezones. As the happiness team grew, we started having regular syncs that proved to be super helpful to stay in touch and talk about bugs and customer happiness. Now it seems like we have almost added another touchpoint of communication for each new team member that has joined the t
How do your interactions differ between the online world and the offline? Away from the computer, we may have a better feeling on how to interact with one another and build relationships. Online? It’s a bit of a different world. As a distributed team at Buffer—meaning we all work from wherever we’re happiest—our interactions together and our relationships with one another take place online. The same goes for many of the connections we make on social media. So it seems worthwhile to have a bet
For as long as we’ve run Buffer, we’ve had to send new team members some form of employment agreement. We’re currently in the middle of raising $3.5m in new funding and, as part of the due diligence in this funding round, we’ve been revisited these agreements. We’ve never felt completely comfortable about the agreements we send out, and it can often be a shock and in stark contrast to the style of the rest of our hiring process, where we try to take extra steps to show that we truly care about
Most social media experts will say that the core to Twitter greatness is: 1. Providing real value and engaging with others 2. Acting the way you would act in a real life situation 3. Never spamming 4. Building meaningful relationships These foundational concepts are hugely helpful in making Twitter really work for you. And when you’re ready to build on these foundations and scale your Twitter engagement and reach, there are some useful next-level tactics that work great, too. I’ve had a ch
We’ve talked lots on the blog about how we communicate and the tools we use to get work done as a remote team, but I thought it might be fun to give you a bit of a different view into the life of a Buffer team member. In this post, I’d like to tell you about the ways we communicate that aren’t so much about work. From GIFs in Hipchat to theme days on Sqwiggle to supportive notes on iDoneThis and even our UP apps, Buffer has a great variety of “virtual watercoolers” that keep us connected in wor
How does your audience decide what it wants to click, share, favorite, and purchase? Understanding a bit of behavioral psychology can go a long ways toward a better understanding of your audience and why they do the things they do on social media and on your website. There’s tons here for marketers to discover, and the psychology of human interaction can lead to some quick wins in the way you compose your social media updates and communicate online. I’ve collected 15 of my favorite psychologic
October and September (I’m lumping them together because I did not manage to get a Crafters report done for the month of September, so sorry!) were huge months for Buffer’s small team of Crafters. So big, in fact, that much of the “way we do things” has changed immensely over the past 60 days. It’s been incredibly exciting, and I’d love to tell you all about it. But first, let’s take a quick look at the numbers! Buffer Social analytics Traffic stats Our overall numbers have stabilized from
Twitter tips is one of our favorite topics on the blog. We love learning how to get more followers, earn more clicks, and share better content. Twitter represents a huge—and free!—opportunity for marketers to distribute content, engage with others in their industry, and promote their brand online. And we’re keen to find the absolute best way to get the most value out of Twitter. We’ve written before about Twitter tips for beginners, time-saving hacks, and advanced techniques, and for the firs
Speaker, podcaster and career coach DJ Waldow recently joined us for #bufferchat to discuss living your passion. See the full Storify recap here. What does it mean to live your passion? From DJ: * “Living your passion: Do What You Love | Love What You Do – This@ugmonk t says it all: http://instagram.com/p/rKOeUPx8k5/“ * “If you are LIVING YOUR PASSION (or know someone who is) I’d love to have you on my podcast http://socialbutterflyguy.com/passion “ Other great insights: * “Living you
I’m constantly amazed and inspired by the way that others go about experimenting, testing, and trying out new methods to get more value out of their social media marketing. Constant testing is something we love to do at Buffer. So I’m always keen to hear about new tests to try. There’s no shortage of intriguing new social media strategies. I’m excited to share 10 of the latest ones I’ve been interested to try here at Buffer. Do you think these might work for you and your social media marketin
At Buffer and many other customer-centric startups, the product, marketing, and engineering teams all listen to customer questions and answer them directly. I’ve often been floored by how much of their personal time our customers will take to help us think through challenges, suggest improvements, and share ideas. Our Uservoice page is regularly updated with votes and comments. It’s incredibly fun to watch. How all our Buffer team members work with customers has changed through the years as th
In October, Buffer announced a new funding round, launched the new Buffer for iOS 8 and iPad, and laid the groundwork to hire for many new positions! Here are our latest numbers as of the end of October: * New users: 76,973 (Total: 1,861,443 from 1,784,516: +4.3%) * Daily active users: 43,231 (up from 41,647: +3.8%) * Monthly active users: 174,121 (up from 166,511: +4.6%) * Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): $390,752 (ARR: $4,689,024: +6.9%) * Cash in bank: $1,004,862 (last month: $846,145)
When you’re creating useful, actionable, epic content, everyone deserves to see it. So how do you get your hard work and effort seen by the largest audience possible? We’ve considered that question often at Buffer, as we try to maximize our content so it reaches the people who need it. There are certain strategies you can put into place for spreading your content far and wide, and there are a good number of tools that can help these strategies run super smooth. Here are the tools we use (and
Author Ann Handley joined #Bufferchat to discuss ways to take your writing to the next level. Check out her latest book, “Everybody Writes” for great advice on writing and content marketing. Check out the full recap on Storify here! Is writing a habit or an art? From Ann: * “Writing is habit before an art. It’s hard to create something that’s artful without first building the muscle.” * ” ‘As the martial arts: A black belt means you’ve mastered the basics and are ready to master the art.’
Imagine taking a week off at the beach while your social media profiles hummed along without missing a beat. One of the greatest social media superpowers you hold—as an individual, a brand, or an agency—is the ability to control time. With the right tool, you can post into the future so that the next two days, two weeks, or even two months are taken care of, no matter where you happen to be. Social media automation makes it possible to save time, stay flexible, and plan your online marketing s